Easter chocolate eggs

I wasn't looking for a chocolate egg mold, but when I saw it at the store where I bought the moon cake molds I couldn't resist.

I have never made chocolate eggs before, I always thought it looked a bit complicated, but for some reason I thought it was time to do try it out. It was not easy, I guess is one of these things where "practice makes perfect" gives you encouragement. But it was so much worth it, egg mold is here to stay.

The mold is made of hard plastic and gives 9 whole eggs. Each egg half holds 2 tsp of water, so they are just perfect size, not too small not too big. What I did was, I melted chocolate, filled each half with a bit less then 1 tsp and I spread it around by moving the mold. Then I put it in the fridge until chocolate was hard and repeated the coating 3 times more, but with a brush, thought it was easier.

The tricky part was to make nice, flat, thick edges as they are important when you are putting two egg halves together. And to keep egg shells nice and shiny, next time I will wear plastic gloves.

As much as I was excited about the chocolate shells that much I was excited about the filling inside the eggs. After some creative thinking the result was eggs filled with ingredients from 3 different continents and 3 different countries.

Jasmine tea and dark chocolate ganache - tea was discovered in China and is very important in Chinese culture. There are close to 1000 different types of tea but in this chocolate egg I chose jasmine. Jasmine and dark chocolate go so well together. I infused tea with hot cream, strained it and mixed with chocolate to make ganache, wonderful!






Daim bar and milk chocolate ganache - Daim is so Swedish, so Swedish you can find it at IKEA. It is made of crunchy almond bar and covered with milk chocolate. I crushed some of it and mixed with a milk chocolate ganache, love it love it love it...




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Amaranth and cajeta - cajeta is Mexican syrup that is made of caramelized goats milk...yes goats milk! I am lucky enough to have supply of cajeta and amaranth all year round from Mexico.

 
Green tea and amaranth - this one is a hit! I made white chocolate ganache, added some green tea powder (Chinese, not Japanese matcha) and mixed with some amaranth.

Moon cake molds

I found them, the moon cake molds! Not traditional ones made of wood (second picture), but for now these plastic ones will do just fine. I call them Shanghainese-style moon cake molds, they represent something traditional but with a modern touch, just as Shanghai does.

These wonderful square and round molds come with 8 different prints each. I still do not know what all of them mean but I am working on it. There were two different sizes, big and small, but I chose to buy the small ones. I like the idea of cookie-size moon cakes. And can you imagine green-tea cookies with one of those wonderful characters?

I already have zillion ideas for the filling (yes one of them is Nutella!) and now the only thing I need is a good recipe for a moon cake dough. Mid-Autumn festival 2008 here we come!

Kumquat and apple charlotte

Kumquats and apples go really well together. In this charlotte I was tempted to use only kumquats but thought the flavor could be too strong (can have too much of kumquats after all).
I also like to use brioche instead of bread loaf when making charlotte because I think it gives a perfect crispy/buttery/juicy combination. This recipe serves 4 individual charlottes.

Kumquat and apple charlotte
4 apples
15 kumquats
juice of one orange
1/2 dl sugar
150 gr butter
14 slices brioche (size of a bread loaf), a bit dried out
4 individual pudding molds

Peel and core the apples and cut into small pieces. Slice and seed kumquats. Melt a spoon of butter in a pan, add the fruits, orange juice and sugar and cook on a low heat for about 20 minutes. Set aside to cool a bit.

In the meantime cut the edges of the brioche and cut 4 circles that will cover the bottom of the pudding mold.Cut the rest of the brioche in 3 cm wide rectangles. Melt the rest of the butter and brush each piece of the brioche on both sides.

Put the circles on the bottom of the pudding mold and line around with the brioche rectangles. rectangles should be a bit bigger then the mold as you will seal the pudding with them. Fill the mold with the fruits and seal it.

Preheat the oven 200 C and put the molds in. To keep everything in place while baking and to get a nice shape place a heavy heatproof plate or similar on the top of the molds. Bake for about 20 minutes, take of the heavy plate and bake until the top is golden. Charlotte is best eaten while warm.

Lantern Festival

Lantern Festival falls exactly 15 days after the Chinese New Year and it ends the celebration of the new year. Lanterns are hung all over the city and sticky rice dumplings (yuanxiao) served in sweet (or savoury) soup are eaten.
The sweet soup is usually made with rock sugar and ginger, but I used slab sugar and kumquat, so if you want to impress your Chinese friends don't do as I did, although the soup was very delicious.

Slab sugar is a Chinese type of sugar that is made of white sugar, brown sugar and honey. It gives a bit of brownish color but it doesn't have a strong flavor.

Yuanxiao-sticky rice dumplings
1 dl sticky rice flour
1 tsp oil
1/2 dl hot water
1 dl red bean paste for the filling

4 dl water
100 gr slab sugar (1 stick)
10 kumquats, sliced and seeded

Mix flour, oil and water with a spoon until the dough comes together. Let rest for 15 minutes. The sticky rice flour lives up to its name when you mix it with water, the dough is incredibly sticky. To be able to work with it you need to sprinkle the dough with sticky rice flour so that it doesn't stick to your hands. Divide the dough in 10 pieces, flatten each piece with a slightly thicker center and put a bit of red bean paste in the middle, close carefully.

Put water and sugar in a sauce pan and simmer until sugar melts. Add kumquats and simmer for 10 minutes. Set aside.

In another pan boil 1 liter of water and boil dumplings until they float on the surface. Put couple of dumplings in a small bowl together with the kumquat soup. Serves 2-3.

A perfect Valentine's Day cake

This is a cake that has it all: chocolate, hazelnuts and meringue! To share it with the one you love is all you need for a perfect Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's!

Chinese New Year

Happy New 4706, the year of the Rat! Chinese New Year is the most important holiday in China. The year of the Rat started on February 7th and it was a real pleasure to see how it is celebrated here in China. Not surprisingly food is quite central in the celebration, it is all about cured meats, dried fruits and Reunion Dinner. The dinner on the New Years Eve is called "Reunion Dinner" and as the name implies it is a dinner when family reunites.

Some of the traditional dishes served at Reunion Dinner are: dried goose, clay pot, dumplings, boiled chicken, stewed pork leg, jellyfish, bamboo shots with meat, 8 treasure sticky rice, new year cake, red dates in honey, etc...

One dish that is particularly popular here in Shanghai is the "New year cake with Shanghai pak choy". New year cake it self is not a sweet cake as you might think, it is made of glutinous rice flour and it can be used in both sweet and savoury dishes. Before coming to China I was not familiar with the new year cake, but here it is sold vacuum-packed all year round. New year cake symbolizes "a prosperous new year".

Shanghai pak choy looks a bit different than the regular pak choy. It is light green and leaves are bit wider, but the taste is quite the same. Its meaning in Shanghainese dialect is " getting rid of all worries". A double serving please.

So here comes a recipe for a prosperous new year where all worries will be out of the way.

New Year Cake with Shanghai Pak Choy
450 gr new year cake (1 pack)
200 gr pork, cut in small stripes
300 gr pak choy

pinch of salt and sugar
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tbsp shaoxing wine (Chinese cooking wine)
piece of ginger, chopped

some oil
salt and pepper
1 tsp sesame oil

Marinate pork and let stand for 30 minutes. Stir fry until almost done, 3-4 min, remove and set aside. Add some oil to the wok and stir fry new year cake for couple of minutes until soft. Add pak choy, salt and pepper, stir fry for a 1-2 min, add pork and heat through. Drizzle with sesame oil and serve.

Kumquat

It is kumquat season and is raining kumquats here. I love it, am totally obsessed. Kumquat is native to China and it is a very much appreciate fruit, especially during the Chinese New Year as it symbolizes "prosperity". Small kumquat plants are sold on the markets and are used as decoration during the New Year celebration.

The fresh kumquat it self is delicious, but it can do magic when used in cooking. In this recipe I mixed candied kumquat with amaranth (another obsession of mine) and white chocolate. So simple but so fantastic! First you need to candied kumquats, which is very simple but takes time as the kumquats need to dry for about 2 days after they have been cooked. I did not use lots of sugar as the white chocolate is quite sweet.

Candied kumquats
10 kumquats
2 dl water
0,5 dl sugar

Wash and then slice kumquat. Discard the seeds. Heat the water and sugar, add sliced kumquat and simmer 20 - 30 minutes. Spread kumquat over baking paper and let it air-dry for a day or two.

Candied kumquat and amaranth
Melt some white chocolate (be careful as white chocolate does not like it too hot), add candied kumquat and popped amaranth. Shape it nicely, decorate with some more candied kumquat and let cool.

Fresh water chestnut

This is how fresh water chestnut looks like. Before coming to China I have never seen or eaten fresh water chestnut, only canned one. But here in China you can find the fresh one everywhere, as it is a Chinese/ South East Asian vegetable.

The skin is very thin and soft and it is easily peeled off. The white inside has a bit different crunchiness then the canned water chestnut has. The fresh ones reminds a lot of eating green apple. And the colour is also more milk-white, it looks wonderful in dishes.

Red-bean paste

Being introduced to sweet red beans you can find the recipe for the wonderful red-bean paste here . I used white granulated sugar but a bit less of it and it worked fine.

On the picture you can see what the beans look like. They are very tiny and obviously there is a Chinese (hong-dou) and Japanese (adzuki) version but I think they are the same beans as Japanese use them in sweets as well. The paste it self is wonderful, it does have a hint of beans but is not like it reminds of chili con carne. Here I used it in crepes but I can see so much more potential here!

The chocolate of China

Red-bean is Chinese chocolate. Not because red-bean tastes anything like cacao-bean, as we already know, but because red-bean is used the same way chocolate is used in the western countries. Yes red-beans are eaten sweet..and it tastes delicious! My first encounter with sweet red-bean was in the moon cakes and I knew immediately that I needed to find out more about it. And where do u start if not at bakeries :-).

Here below you can see some typical red-bean sweets that I found in different bakeries here in Shanghai. The most commonly red-beans are made into a sweet paste. They are boiled, mashed and mixed with sugar and some oil. But sometimes they are just boiled, mixed with sugar syrup and used in different pastries, soups, cakes, as you can see below.

 

Steamed bun with red-bean paste. This is the most common bun with red-bean paste and is sold all over Shanghai, from bakeries to small street vendors. I will write more just about steamed bread later on.

Red-bean paste is stuffed inside a bread slice and fried. Ends are dipped in white and black sesame.

 Sweet buns filled with red-bean paste and sprinkled with black sesame.






Red-bean paste is thinly spread between dough layers.







I thought this bun was with red-bean, it had a character for bean in its name, so you cannot blame me, but I guess the rest of the characters said "big black bean" :-). I have never before seen that big black beans, they were delicious too but are not that common.






Green-tea mousse with whole red-bean on top. The combination green-tea and red-beans is very common as well. Later on I will write more about it.










Yes, there is red-bean to drink...











... and to eat as sweet soup together with some kind of jelly.